


In the Name of…

by kurage_hime



Category: Original Work
Genre: Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Mild Sexual Content, University Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-05-30 10:24:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15094748
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kurage_hime/pseuds/kurage_hime
Summary: An American exchange student meets a prince. Love happens.





	In the Name of…

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MildredMost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MildredMost/gifts).



It was during my semester as an exchange student. I was twenty-one years old.

Undergraduates at MIT have an extensive menu of study abroad options to choose from, and given that I’d never even _been_ outside the United States before – or, to be perfectly honest, off the East Coast – I decided to avail myself of one of those options. After some hemming and hawing and much earnest discussion with my parents, I chose to spend the spring of my junior year in the _other_ Cambridge. You know, the one in England.

MIT had an established exchange program with Trinity College, and I’d get to study mathematics – or “maths,” as the Brits like to say – at the same institution that was once intellectual home base to such scientific luminaries as Isaac Newton and Stephen Hawking. Opportunity of a lifetime! And I guess I also thought it’d be, like, you know, a Harry Potter Experience.

It wasn’t. For one thing, my luggage wasn’t magicked to my room for me. The so-called College Porters weren’t even the right sort of porters for that.

So there I was, huffing and puffing and sweating and dragging my luggage up a staircase, one arduous, thumping step at a time. Really, I shouldn’t have packed so many books. My suitcase probably weighed as much as I did! I stopped for a short break on the landing halfway to the top.

“Need some help with that?” A devastatingly handsome young man, obviously a fellow student, was peering up at me from the foot of the stairs.

“No, no, it’s okay, I can—” I said, blushing furiously. My masculinity was being called into question here!

“No worries,” the young man said, ignoring my embarrassment. “Let’s carry it up together. Ready?”

I nodded wordlessly. The option of refusal had effectively been taken away from me. He took one end of my suitcase, and I took the other. We carried it up together.

“There’s a lift over in the Wolfson Building you can use next time, you know,” the young man remarked casually as he cheerfully escorted me and my luggage all the labyrinthine way to the door to C staircase on Blue Boar Court.

And that’s how I met Prince Charlie.

 

* * *

 

I didn’t know the first thing about him. Hell, I hadn’t even _recognized_ him that first time on the stairs! Maybe he liked that.

But in any case, the tabloids had given him the nickname, “Nerd Prince.” In a family characterized by indifference to academic pursuits, Charlie was quite a bit above-average. And he liked maths. That alone was more than enough to earn him that nerd label.

We were in the same supervision groups for most of our papers (“papers” is Cambridgese for “courses”), and before long, in the usual way, academic pursuits bled into social pursuits – meals together in hall, drinks at The Eagle – and Prince Charlie and I were, I suppose, becoming friends.

The University of Cambridge is composed of thirty-one constituent Colleges, and you would be forgiven, given the name, for assuming that the Royal Spare of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland would be a member of King’s College.

He wasn’t, though. Members of the Royal Family read their undergraduate degrees at the University of Cambridge as members of Trinity College. It’s traditional. There’s even a room reserved for them on one of the staircases in Great Court – which is the largest enclosed court in Europe, so you know.

Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Yeah…and then you find out that the rooms aren’t ensuite, and most of the staircases don’t even have modern showers installed. Want a shower? Hope you like toting toiletries and a towel across Great Court for tourist photo-snapping pleasure. (I told Prince Charlie he should charge them for the privilege. He got a good belly laugh from that suggestion. I didn’t intend it as a joke, though: He looks mighty fine damp and with only a towel wrapped around his waist.)

It made my “commoner” room in Blue Boar Court, with its ensuite shower with the excellent water pressure seem like a luxury fit for a prince by comparison…

…which may be why Prince Charlie started hanging out a lot in my room. Before long, hell, it was like he was living there almost as much as I was!

 

* * *

 

Sex happened for the first time five weeks into Lent Term. I was surprised when he kissed me. I hadn’t known he was gay. I guess nobody’d known.

My body was like the most interesting ever maths problem to him; he took me apart and put me back together again like a differential equation. It was _bliss_. I’d never come so hard or so frequently before in my life. He had me in my bed, bent over my desk, straddled across my hips in the room’s one upholstered chair, and sprawled out on the blue-carpeted floor.

Oh, and yes, we did it in my nice, modern shower stall with the excellent water pressure. We did it there a lot, actually, which was good because it made the cleanup easy.

As it was, my bedder (“bedder” is Cambridgese for “room cleaner”) was grumbling and sighing all too regularly about all the jizz stains.

 

* * *

 

I think he told me he loved me the first time while we were in the shower. I told him I loved him, too.

We never looked back, and I never went back to MIT. I made a new university application and was offered an undergraduate place at Trinity. Charlie and I received our degree certificates in the Senate House together.

 

* * *

 

By the start of Easter Term, everyone in College knew about us, and that meant that everyone who was reading the tabloids or, you know, had an internet connection and sufficient motivation, also knew about us. I suppose a lot of people thought it was a phase – commoners marrying into the family were accepted, and commoner Americans were too after Harry tied the knot and managed not to untie it in acrimonious divorce before the year was out, but commoner Americans of the male persuasion were still beyond the pale as far as Charlie’s self-evidently immortal Grandmum was concerned.

It took a while for her to come around. But she did. Eventually.

Tonight, we’re being feted in the Master’s Lodge of Trinity College. Our friends and families will be there. So will the Master of the College and many of the Fellows, including our Director of Studies. The journalists will be there too, of course, a whole horde of them, because, at the end of the evening, we plan to announce our engagement.

It’s only fitting that the announcement happen here. After all, this is where we met.

“Can you believe it’s been seven years since we carried my luggage up that damn staircase?” I ask.

Charlie just laughs and hands me another glass of port.

“I still have all those books, you know.”

“Yes, I know.”

“I’m never, ever getting rid of them now!”

“Cheers to that,” Charlie says. We clink glasses.

We won’t be _married_ here, naturally; Westminster Abbey is traditional for royal weddings, and I wouldn’t be gay-married to Charlie anywhere else in the world, goddammit. We have as much right to the glamour and the pageantry as anybody!

Besides, it’s the Church of England: Our vows will be sanctified the name of the Holy Trinity.


End file.
